Templeton Reid was a man of mechanical talents. Living in Georgia in the early 19th century, his talents were largely devoted to the maintenance and construction of cotton gins, although his machining skills were not limited to agrarian purposes. Reid was at times a watchmaker, a jeweler, a gunsmith, etc.: as a metalworker with a lathe, forge, press, calipers, and other tools of his trade, metal manufacturing within strict tolerances was not a difficult prospect for Reid. As customers’ needs changed, Reid was ready to fulfill those needs.
In 1828, a need suddenly developed in Templeton Reid’s neighborhood. Gold was discovered in northern Georgia in the counties surrounding Reid’s home. This brought an influx of money into the area, as well as legions of ambitious prospectors. The U.S. Mint at the time was still a rather new entity, and while they were able to produce coins from the new gold, the metal would have to be sent off to the Mint, weighed, refined, and assayed before being minted into coin for use by citizens. The gold that came right from the ground was quite pure, and since the dollar was closely tied to the weight of gold at the time, prospectors and area businesses were comfortable weighing raw gold as a way to pay for goods. It would be easier, of course, if there was a way for gold to quickly be turned into coined currency, and Reid saw his opportunity.
The Constitution of the United States of America says, quite clearly, that states cannot mint their own coins because only the national government has a right to create a mint. Templeton Reid’s loophole was that, while state and nation were explicitly mentioned, nothing addressed the possibility of a private, citizen-run mint. Using his metalworking tools, Reid was entirely capable of designing and manufacturing dies, smelting gold, and stamping coins himself. Once Reid’s operation was underway in the summer of 1830, he became the first private mint to operate in the United States of America.
Reid’s coins were minted in values of $10, $5, $2.50, and $2, with a simple design that included his name, the coin’s value, the year 1830, and the words “Georgia Gold”. Soon after, he moved his operations to Gainesville, Georgia, and eventually built up his business until he was producing around $700 of coins a day. The U.S. Mint had intentions of establishing a new mint of their own in this new gold-rich region, but they would still be a few years off, so for the time being it looked like Templeton Reid’s private mint would corner the market on minting Georgia gold coins.
Reid, however, had gained an enemy. In late August 1830, an anonymous writer, identifying themselves as “No Assayer,” claimed to have sent a sample of Reid’s coins to the U.S. Mint for analysis. The Mint provided an assaying service, which was primarily used for valuing foreign coins, but worked just as well with these new domestically-minted gold coins. No Assayer sent a letter to the Southern Recorder newspaper, outlining his findings. He claimed that Templeton Reid’s gold was closer in nature to the impurity-laden gold straight out of the ground than the refined, purified gold used in the federal currency; the $10 piece, he claimed, only had $9.38 of gold in it, or a built-in 32¢ profit for Reid on each eagle. Part of the reason the Mint could not quickly establish a new office in Georgia was due to the materials and equipment required to properly purify gold and silver; Templeton Reid was a skilled metalworker, but was not a sophisticated metallurgist, nor was he equipped as such.
6% or 7% might not have ever been a serious enough of a variance to concern people using the coins in daily transactions, but this highly visible public disclosure of a possible flaw in Reid’s coins shook people’s faith in their value. Templeton Reid never got to make dies with the 1831 year; he shut down his private mint by the end of 1830. Until the U.S. Mint opened the Dahlonega, GA Mint in 1838, prospectors and speculators had 
to accept the cost and inconvenience of sending their gold to Philadelphia for assay and minting services.
History, however, may not have stopped there for Reid. In 1849, gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill in California. A few years later, two mysterious coins appeared at the Philadelphia Mint to be assayed. One was a $10, the other a $25 coin, both dated 1849, identified as California coins, with the Templeton Reid name on the obverse. Recognizing the rarity of these two coins, the Mint documented the coins and placed them in the Mint’s collection. The $25 coin was stolen shortly thereafter; the $10 was still in the Philadelphia Mint’s collection at the beginning of the 20th century, and it is now reportedly in the Smithsonian’s collection. Templeton Reid would have been well into his sixties by 1849, had not minted coins in nearly two decades, and was still living in Georgia, which puts the authenticity of the coins in question. It is possible, however, for California gold to have made it to Georgia and been minted there, if Reid were willing and capable of resuming his private mint.
Around the time the Dahlonega Mint started their minting operations in the late 1930s, the value of gold was adjusted. The price of gold went up, and Reid’s impure $10 gold coins now held a little over $10 in gold. Templeton Reid had only minted a few thousand coins during the few short months he ran his pioneering mint, and the majority of those were melted and re-minted in the coming years. Today, Templeton Reid coins are extremely rare, and only a few dozen are known to still exist today. In 1997, a set of three Templeton Reid Georgia gold coins, a $2.50, a $5, and a $10, sold for $750,000 at auction; last year, the $2.50 coin seen above was up for auction, but did not sell. Although the $25 California Templeton Reid coin is stolen property, if it does happen to turn up in some private collection, it would be an amazing recovery of one of the rarest gold coins known, whether or not it actually came from the dies of Templeton Reid himself.
